Sandhya Eknelygoda

19 results arranged by date

Dear President Sirisena: The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom organization, is writing to congratulate you on your recent victory in Sri Lanka's presidential election. As Sri Lanka readies itself for a new chapter in its history, we urge your government to take concrete and meaningful steps to improve the climate for press freedom.

In Sri Lanka, where there has seldom been good news for the
media in recent years, things have taken a further turn for the worse, as well
as a turn for the bizarre. With President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government secure
in its 2010 electoral mandate, its leaders have made fresh moves to tighten
their control of the press. There is a plan afoot to re-criminalize defamation,
and legislation has been proposed for a code of ethics that threatens to give the
government a legal basis to quash journalism it deems "unethical." All this comes
ahead of November's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Colombo,
which seems sure to go ahead despite calls for boycotts from several quarters
because of the government's poor human rights record.

When I first met Sandhya Eknelygoda in May
2010 in her home outside Colombo, she was a distressed mother of two young
boys whose husband had gone missing. He was last seen four months earlier, just
prior to the elections that returned President Mahinda Rajapaksa to power after
the end of the decades-long war with Tamil secessionists. She still has no
inkling of the whereabouts of her husband Prageeth, a cartoonist and columnist
for the opposition website Lanka eNews (which has since ceased
to operate in Sri Lanka because of arson
attacks and legal harassment
of its staff, but is maintained overseas).

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Former
Attorney General Mohan Peiris has been ordered to testify about a statement he
made at the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva on November 9, 2011, in
which he said that Prageeth
Eknelygoda was alive and living outside the country (see "Sri
Lanka's savage smokescreen"). Peiris will have to appear at the Homogama
Magistrate's Court in Colombo on June 5, next Tuesday, which has been hearing
the case brought by Eknelygoda's wife, Sandhya, to learn more about his disappearance
on January 24, 2010.

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On Wednesday, Sri Lanka's Supreme Court slammed the door on a
case about the shutdown of four websites that had failed to register with the
government. In handing down its decision, the Court appeared to rule that
freedom of expression in Sri Lanka is not an absolute right and can be
restricted--and you don't need to pass a law to do so. The three-judge panel
told the petitioners who brought the case--Sunil Jayasekara, convener of the
Free Media Movement, and Udaya Kalupathirana, a member of the movement's
executive committee--that they saw no reason for the court to hear any further
arguments.

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On Monday, I wrote about two
demonstrations scheduled for Sri Lanka this week. Both were meant to
commemorate the ugly string of anti-press attacks in recent Januaries, which has included journalists
killed and abducted, television stations bombed, websites attacked, and media
offices torched. But Wednesday's Black January effort,
publicized by the Free Media Movement (FMM) and other media support groups, was
sabotaged and had to be moved at the last minute. A source in Colombo gave the
following account, the outlines of which were confirmed by other CPJ sources:

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A couple of weeks ago, I
described the terrible incidence of anti-press abuse that has come each recent
January in Sri Lanka. Media activists have come to call the month "Black
January" for good reason, as this email message details:

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A short follow-up to yesterday's alert about Sandhya
Eknelygoda--"Sri
Lankan journalist missing for 500 days"--and her attempts to get assistance
from anyone in the Sri Lankan government or at the United Nations to help her
learn more about the disappearance of her husband, Prageeth. The BBC's Colombo correspondent Charles Haviland produced a story
about Eknelygoda and her two teenage sons, Harith and Sanjay, and puts their
story in the context of the other disappearances in Sri Lanka. It's a powerful piece. Follow this link to
the BBC story.